Blue Dress Hot Mess

A London Diary: Contemplations from the 10.23

I ride the train. May is flitting past outside the window, and I feel wholly and utterly myself. 

I listen to a podcast. She said: “In Covid, our minds were quiet”. What would it feel like to have a quiet mind? I don’t think my mind has ever been quiet; it is more like a dawn chorus; a gospel choir; a nursery full of 5 year olds. I do not know a quiet mind. I do not know that I’d want to. 

I am in my London Persona. She is cool. She likes to think she is, at least. She is, unfortunately, still embodying last summer’s lime-green trend (it should be butter yellow in 2025; I am not, and never was, a “Brat”, I am just a year late to the frat-party she’s throwing), and everything is a shade of green – jumper (oversized, over white jeans), bag (distinctly lime-y in hue, perhaps – at a push – with the required undertone of yellow), handbag (small, faux-snake skin (unless the snake was very unwell and died a pallid shade of green)). Even her jacket – again oversized, so that it hangs lower even than the green jumper – is a tweed, a cross-stitched forest floor with the occasional line of violent purple and blue-blood red (by that I mean it is pure). Coco Chanel made tweed fashionable. The London Persona Me can’t reject her country-self wholly. I have a Barbie-doll half-up-half-down pink scrunchie in my hair (because it is Me, after all, that I am analysing in this way; en route to London, somewhere between Haddenham and Thame Parkway and High Wycombe, the third person association of the London Persona becomes the first person, dull, “Me”. Is she dull? Or is she merely less interesting because we find it so hard to look at ourselves objectively. It is easier to disassociate, and analyse. It is harder to embody, and look within). 

I see mock-croc handbags and flowery shirts; I see business men, working. (I think I am annoyed that I see no business women. I know they are working too, probably harder. Perhaps they are less obnoxious. No “Dell” laptop open on the fold-out train table; no uninteresting grey suit which would blend with the London day; no black-framed glasses, or Pret coffee mug, or slim (the only slim thing about him) smile which is more dutiful than content. There are business women behind the scenes. Perhaps, like me, they wear green). 

I hear young men talk about their parent’s house in France— weddings — offering to put a lady’s case on the rack (no torture, please. Not on the 10.23 to London Marylebone. Spare us, spare us, the torture here at least). The train is full. We are cut off from the May day outside (it is clouded anyway; the elderflower stank on the station platform. A stench of Spring, decayed by petrol fumes). We are cut off from one another. I like it; we are all allowed, in companionable silence, to live our own lives. This is life we are living; we will not live this life again. There will not be another 10.23 to London Marylebone. There will not be another grey day, warm train, London promise, polish-less nails. There will be another butter yellow (another lime-green); there will be another businessman, another wedding-ringed hand massaging sore temples (it is only 10.42). There will be another Pret coffee, and another distanced, hesitant, “May I sit here?” smile. 

A business woman has boarded the train. She opens her laptop – unbranded. She wears a blue suit, grey scarf, gold hoops. Her bag is green. I smile. Businesswomen wear green. I move my green bag out of the aisle, shuffling it with my feet. On the 10.23 to London Marylebone, we wear green.